Loss of habitats, naturalness and species diversity in Eurasian forest landscapes

Abstract

Abstract Man has exploited land and forests in Western and Central Europe longer and more intensively than in Northern Europe and further east in Eurasia. We estimated forest naturalness and modelled expected biodiversity loss in seven different landscapes (2500 km2 each) in the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Poland, St. Petersburg (Western European Russia), Perm (Eastern European Russia), and Irkutsk (Central Siberia) across the distribution of Pinus sylvestris L. in Eurasia. Field inventories showed that the mean living tree volumes were relatively similar in the studied sites, but the volumes of dead wood differed greatly. In Irkutsk and Perm the volume of dead trees per ha was about 5–10 times larger than in Central and Western European regions. The studied forests were generally young in all regions except for Irkutsk, where about half of the study plots had trees older than 120 years. Signs of recent forest fires were found almost exclusively on Russian sites. According to Landsat satellite image-based land-cover classifications the amount of remaining forest habitat in the studied landscapes varied from 25% in the Netherlands to 93% in Irkutsk. Estimated by forest patch size and density of cut stumps, forests were also more fragmented and heavily managed in the western study landscapes compared to eastern ones. Based on species–area relationship functions, we calculated that the proportion of forest-dwelling species already extinct or expected to become extinct due to habitat loss ranges from 1–2% in Irkutsk to 13–24% in the Netherlands study landscape. For saproxylic species, which depend on dead wood, the extinction estimates were calculated based on remaining dead wood volume in the landscape. The modelled expected loss of saproxylic species ranged from 7–14% in Irkutsk to 35–58% in the Netherlands.